Author: Kelsie Schueneman

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is remarkably unique in the way that it flips the power balance between men and women. This is most notable in the marionette scene. About half an hour into the film Veronique and her students watch a puppet show about a ballerina who breaks her leg the first time she performs. This scene is the first time Veronique sees Alexandre, the puppeteer and children’s book author. Though this sequence is only about three minutes long, the comprising shots reveal quite a bit about male and female roles in the film. By utilizing contrasting closeups and medium shots, Kieslowski reverses the typical roles of men and women in film. In Laura Mulvey’s, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she introduces the concept of the male gaze. This idea suggests that women in film are typically shot in such a way that the males in the film as well as the audience can derive pleasure from looking at them. She argues that narrative cinema is shaped by an inequality between genders …

Kelsie Schueneman is currently a junior at Oakland University from Milford, Michigan. Kelsie is majoring in Cinema Studies and minoring in Creative Writing. She is an editor of Screen Culture. Kelsie is passionate about female representation in film. This essay was written for Prof. Brendan Kredell's "Methods of Cinema Studies" course.